FACULTY OF ENGLISH STUDIES

ACADEMIC DISCOURSE 2011-2012

ASSIGNMENT
(10/100)
TASK 1: Newspaper to Academic
TASK 2: Outline - Summary
TASK 3: Description and Interpretation of data

Deadline: 11th, 12th January 2011

(each section must hand-in on respective scheduled class)
PLEASE NOTE:
No assignments will be accepted beyond the designated deadline
TASK 1
(1) Rewrite (in terms of linguistic features, layout, structure, style/tone and information
to be excluded/included) the following newspaper article from the Independent for
the purpose of appearing in the academic journal Nature (100 words).
(2) Suggest a title for your academic text.
(3) Provide an ending-bibliographical source (by improvising date, volume and page
numbers).
Jawbone shows we lived with Neanderthals
y Steve Connor
The INDEPENDENT, Thursday 03 November 2011

A fragment of the jaw bone, with three teeth, discovered in Devon

The long scientific dispute over when anatomically modern humans first arrived in Europe on
their long trek out of Africa has come close to resolution with the help of a fragment of
jawbone belonging to an elderly person who lived near present-day Torquay.
Radiocarbon tests have shown that the piece of upper jawbone, containing three well-worn
molar teeth, is between 41,000 and 44,000 years old. This is at least 7,000 years older than
previous thought, suggesting that anatomically modern humans arrived in northwestern
Europe while the Neanderthals were still in residence.
The new analysis of the jawbone, unearthed in 1927 from a cave called Kents Cavern on the
Devon coast, coincides with a study on a pair of milk teeth found in a similar stone-age cave
site called Grotto del Cavallo in the Italian region of Abruzzo. New tests date these teeth to
between 43,000 and 45,000 years old.
The two sets of radiocarbon dates for the jawbone and milk teeth, published in the journal
Nature, suggest that anatomically modern humans were widespread in both the north and
south of western Europe many thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
The dates also help to resolve another long-running dispute by confirming that modern
humans lived alongside the Neanderthals, who had arrived in Europe many tens of thousand
of years earlier. This raises intriguing questions about whether there was any cultural or even
social interaction between these two species of early Europeans DNA studies suggest
limited interbreeding.
Professor Tom Higham of Oxford University, who was part of the radiocarbon dating team,
said that the new evidence from Torquay and Italy shows how quickly people could migrate
in the stone age. These people were mobile hunter-gatherers. They didn't have a permanent
base camp. They moved a lot, he said.
TASK 2
Read the academic text below carefully and:
1. identify the consequences of immigrant users public discourses on ideologies,
attitudes and individuals social positions in the US community, and reproduce
them in a formal outline,
2. based on your outline, summarise the consequences in a paragraph of 80-100
words. Make sure you paraphrase adequately,
3. Using the information below, provide the bibliographical reference of the source.
Language problem or language conflict? Narratives of immigrant womens experiences in the US
Anna De Fina
Kendall A. King
Discourse Studies 13(2)
163-188, 2011
Sociolinguistics and social theorists often have pointed to the status of languages as goods
both in local and global markets (e.g. Heller, 2007; Sarangi, 2001), noting that their perceived
social value is determined by prestige and power rather than utility. This understanding is
informed by Bourdieus (1986) conception of the social world as consisting of relations
involving power and defined by struggles over varied resources. These resources are not

simply economic, but also cultural and symbolic. While economic capital is accrued through
money and assets and social capital through relations and influences, cultural capital entails
the accumulation of knowledge and the right of access to the tools for acquiring that
knowledge. All three resources can become symbolic power, which is the form that the
various species of capital assume when they are perceived as legitimate (Bourdieu, 1989:
17). Thus, through the accumulation of symbolic power, individuals and groups acquire
positions of privilege, and, in turn, social differences are legitimated.
Language is an important form of cultural capital given that it has the potential to be
transformed into symbolic capital and therefore into a tool for individuals and communi ties to
ensure better social positions. These insights are crucial in analyzing the cultural and material
processes of migration as immigrants lives are profoundly influenced by the symbolic status
of their native and new languages. Such symbolic status is established through social and
discursive practices that attach certain values to languages and language users; these practices
also serve as vehicles for the construction and circulation of language ideologies. As Van Dijk
(1998) notes, ideologies are shared social beliefs and representations that underlie social
practices and discourses. In turn, language ideologies are ideas about language circulating in
various discourses (Collins and Slembrouck, 2005: 189). These include evaluations of
linguistic structures or forms as good or bad, as well as language-based evaluations of
individuals as smart, lazy, or criminal (Collins and Slembrouck, 2005).
Language ideologies are central to public discourses about migration in the US in part
because such discourses have long linked English acquisition with social acceptance into the
national community. As Pavlenko (2002) documents, the rise and solidification of intolerant
attitudes towards the presence of other languages coincided with the great migration wave of
18801924. During this period, monolingualism came to signify Americanness (2002:
164), and concomitantly, xenophobia and fear of immigration-related changes became
widespread. More recently, in the face of shifting immigration patterns, the Spanish language
has become a focus of political discourse and activism (MacGregor-Mendoza, 1998). For
instance, recent news (Goldstein, 2009) of a Texas policeman ticketing a woman for not
speaking English confirms both the existence and the concrete social consequences of these
attitudes.
English competency and English monolingualism in particular, are often taken as proxies for
immigrant integration and success (Garca, 1995; Linton, 2009). Together, such ideologies
present considerable challenges to Spanish language use and maintenance (Urciuoli, 1996;
Zentella, 1997). Data suggest that decades after the Civil Rights movement, the US can still
be described as a cemetery for non-English languages. For instance, while Spanish remains
the second most widely spoken language in the US,1 data indicate that Latino immigrants
and their children, in particular are quickly transitioning to English monolingualism (e.g.
Rumbaut et al., 2006).
Nevertheless, immigration and language remain highly charged political and policy issues.
The last decade alone saw 10 states adopt English-only education initiatives and no fewer
than 20 separate pieces of federal legislation promoting English as the national or official
language of the US (US English, 2010). Recent months have also seen controversial, antiimmigrant legislation such as SB1070, passed in Arizona in April 2010, which requires that
police ascertain immigration status when there is reasonable suspicion that the person . . . is
unlawfully present in the U.S. (State of Arizona, 2010). While what might make one
reasonably suspect is not legislated, one could reasonably assume that speaking Spanish
would be sufficient.
Together, these discourses and social practices are tightly linked to a set of ideologies that
equate speaking English and being a good citizen, that demonize Spanish, and that,
furthermore, attribute responsibility for learning English to immigrants themselves (Haviland,

2003). While competence in Spanish is increasingly valuable cultural capital for US elites
(King, 2009; Pomerantz, 2002), Spanish competence very often presents a real and
ideological problem for immigrants, as it is associated with lack of English competence,
failure to assimilate, and illegality.
TASK 3
The bar chart that follows is adapted from a book on Television Dialogue by Paulo Quaglio
(2009, published in Amsterdam and Philadelphia by John Benjamins Publishing
Company). By performing a corpus analysis, the book compares and contrasts the
language used in the sitcom Friends with natural conversation. Study the chart carefully
and in about 160-180 words
(i)
(ii)
(iii)

write an introduction for the bar chart,

describe three significant findings from the bar chart and
explain them by selecting from the possible explanations offered below

Figure 1: Vague, emotional and informal language

Possible explanations
-

expressing a lot of emotion adds dramatic effect to conversation

casual discourse items make televised dialogue credible and authentic
overuse of informal conversation features gives rise to comedy
sounding vague in order to avoid imposing on the interlocutor is well expected in
everyday exchanges
excessive use of vague language may hinder comprehension
people sound much more emotional in relationships of intimacy